It has been 24 days since the US-Israel attacked Iran with the expectation, bordering on surety, that the theocratic Iranian leadership would be destroyed, and the war would be a short one. It’s an assessment that another global leader had made earlier for another war being fought for the last 4 yrs in Europe. Yet, both these conflicts show little signs of coming to an end, despite Trump’s 5-day ‘interregnum’ in which Israel and Iran continue to trade missiles as if the US is a ‘silly’ pacifist state.
What we see in West Asia is a demonstration of the transformation of warfare and, with it, the nature of war — when the battlefield has entered what political scientist Michael Horowitz calls the ‘era of precise mass’ — intersection of high-volume, low-cost drone swarm technology with sophisticated guidance that allows smaller states and non-state actors to achieve mass, a capability once reserved for industrial nations.
The cost of war has escalated. But the cost of wagingwar has plummeted to bargain price. State-of-art precision, the haute couture of deftech, is still premium. But like prêt-à-porter changed fashion markets, mass precision and speed have transformed warfare, making it possible to stand one’s ground despite lacking a stealth bomber. Success now needs the entire value chain of speed, precision and dispensability. But the ‘democratisation’ of weaponry through mass precision, making it possible to wage war at different price points, is just one aspect of ‘discount wars’. Checks and balances — the rules of the game — have cheapened to dysfunction. Which is why the high ‘ease of declaring war’ index shown by the likes of Putin, Netanyahu and Trump for whom casus belli — reason for war — can be made up along the way
What we see in West Asia is a demonstration of the transformation of warfare and, with it, the nature of war — when the battlefield has entered what political scientist Michael Horowitz calls the ‘era of precise mass’ — intersection of high-volume, low-cost drone swarm technology with sophisticated guidance that allows smaller states and non-state actors to achieve mass, a capability once reserved for industrial nations.
The cost of war has escalated. But the cost of wagingwar has plummeted to bargain price. State-of-art precision, the haute couture of deftech, is still premium. But like prêt-à-porter changed fashion markets, mass precision and speed have transformed warfare, making it possible to stand one’s ground despite lacking a stealth bomber. Success now needs the entire value chain of speed, precision and dispensability. But the ‘democratisation’ of weaponry through mass precision, making it possible to wage war at different price points, is just one aspect of ‘discount wars’. Checks and balances — the rules of the game — have cheapened to dysfunction. Which is why the high ‘ease of declaring war’ index shown by the likes of Putin, Netanyahu and Trump for whom casus belli — reason for war — can be made up along the way
